India targeted 16 Twitter accounts in last six months

Jan 28, 2013, 10.19PM ISTTNN[ Javed Anwer ]

In the transparency report Twitter noted they may not comply with every request for a variety of reasons.

NEW DELHI: Twitter on Monday released its second transparency report, specifying what sort of requests it received from governments to censor or remove content. The report, which covers the last six months of 2012, revealed that India had asked the social-networking website to remove accounts or tweets related to 16 users in the specified period.

According to Twitter, it received two requests from India — one from a court and one from a government agency — related to 16 accounts. However, the social networking website neither removed the accounts nor censored the tweets made from those accounts.

During the same period Twitter also received less than 10 requests seeking information about Twitter users from India. In this case too, the website refused to give out any information to the government.

In the transparency report Twitter noted, "We may not comply with every request for a variety of reasons. For example, we do not comply with requests that fail to identify content on Twitter."

The request from Indian officials was likely to be related to some of the accounts that government tried to block in the wake of Assam riots last year. It is possible that when Twitter refused to comply, the government tried to block the accounts with the help of internet service providers. While in some regions of the country these accounts were blocked, for most Twitter users they remained accessible.

According to the Twitter report, the website received 42 requests to remove content or accounts worldwide in the last two quarters compared to just 6 in the first half of 2012. The number of requests seeking information about users was also up. In last six months Twitter received 1009 such requests compared to 849 in the first half of 2012. The number of copyright notices was, however, down from 3378 to 3268.

"Over the course of 2012, we saw a steady increase in government requests (with a slight decline in copyright takedown notices)," Twitter noted in its report. "All signs suggest that these government inquiries will continue to climb into the foreseeable future."

In terms of user accounts, the website received highest number of censor requests from France that targeted 40 accounts. United Kingdom was second as it targeted 25 accounts while Brazil, which targeted 22 accounts, was third. India was fourth. In terms of number of requests, Brazil topped the list with 16 requests.

Among the countries that sought information about Twitter users, the US topped the list with 815 requests.